Large File Transfer

[ky54]

I am switching my media server from an external 1TB drive to an external 3TB drive. Is there a better way to transfer 750GB than just copy/paste from one to the other?

 

[corkyg]

Just clone the 1TB drive to the 3TB drive. Time vs. time? That may depend on how you do it. I would just use drag->drop snd go have breakfast or something while it does it. Just curious - what kind of file gets to be 750GB?

 

[ky54]

I apologize. It should have read "Large Amount of Files Transfer". It's my media folder.

I won't get it from UPS until about 4 EST so I might just drag and drop and go to bed.

 

[SMOGZINN]

Personally I've found that Supercopier or Teracopy can sometimes increase copy time across drives. But really Windows 7 improved the the copy process so much that it is hardly needed anymore. Both programs still have better features, so it is probably still worth installing one of them.

 

[Smoblikat]

I once transferred 1tb of datd over bittorrent. I copied all my stuff to my friends drive, went home (another state) and started the transfer from his comp to mine. Three weeks later I had all my stuff

Drag and drop is the best method, if anything goes wrong you still have all your files in their original location.

 

[corkyg]

And, using Acronis bootable media, you can clone the 1TB to the 3TB in about a half hour. You can select Proportional as the cloning mode to adapt it to the larger size drive. That also preserves your original files until you decide to delete them.

 

[ky54]

That something to look at. I still have a couple of hours before it's delivered so I can read up on Acronis (I haven't used it years) and see if that's more doable then just copy/paste. Thanks for the input.

 

[sm625]

Windows 7 is still very buggy when it comes to copying folders with varying contents. Say for example a subfolder with 100 1GB movies and another subfolder with 20000 small files. It will choke up copying the movies if it is done in the same step but after the small files are copied. I saw my transfer rate drop to under 5MB/sec when it usually copies movies at 50MB/S

 

[ky54]

So it's best then to copy over files in smaller batches instead of trying to do it all in one huge chunk? That's what I did when I set this drive up (and it's two back up drives) and maybe I'll just babysit it and transfer the Movie folder, Music folder, etc... that sounds like a good plan.

 

[ky54]

A quick follow up: I received the drive, formatted it, and have started the long process of moving everything over. I used a 10 GB folder as a test and it's running right around 25 MB. Not great but my old drive is a WD Green so I'm kind of limited on speed. Slow and steady wins the race, eh?

 

[jolancer]

just an FYI for others looking to do the same, just a few things i had come across befor...

First ill just mention that I'm not familiar with the reliability or what precautions and proccess's the "windows" copy paist function utilizes.

HDD manufactures have free tools on there website for this task specifically. I used one along time ago for my WD HD from WD's Diagnostic utility i think, anyway what it seemed to do is just transfer everything with CRC verification or something.

theres also the >rsync -a command under linux if your simply cloning the files and file locations.. that and all other usefull linux cmds iv found easily accessible from live booting sysresccd.org

and from windows the quickest crc file integrity hasher i had was called simply 'fsum' Note- command line app but the fastest i new about at the time.